The Times Square Bomber and the Law

Ordinarily I read The National Review the way some people stare at car wrecks - with a mixture of prurient curiosity and horror. This week, though, Andrew McCarthy made some very useful observations about the Obama Administration's handling of the bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad.

Essentially, his position is this:

The Obama administration strongly prefers the law-enforcement model, and that is how the Times Square case is being handled. Though I believe the military process should be our default choice during wartime, the administration should be cut some slack in this case. There are things to criticize, and the case bears close watching. Knee-jerk derision, though, would be a mistake.

The "slack" comes, he says, primarily from the fact that Shahzad is a US citizen who has not been found conducting actual operations against the United States on the field of battle, not matter how metaphorical we make that field. That is, not everyone guilty of a heinous act with political motives is an "enemy combatant." As is clear from his many caveats and half-apolgies, National Review types do not always accept this basic proposition.

McCarthy also points out that the nature of the case against Shahzad is not yet public, so we do not know for sure that the suspect is a terrorist. In fact, the only evidence tying him to the car bomb appears to be his confession. (Which, by the way, was obtained without torture, in the custody of law enforcement, not the military.)

His willingness to be patient, to argue explicitly that we may disagree with the Obama Administration without name-calling and accusations of insanity of stupidity, stands out not only for his publication but for the tone of political discourse in general in this country of late. I applaud him

Still, the implications of his position are a little weird at times. He seems to indicate that when we do have what we think is iron-clad evidence, the military court system is more appropriate than the civilian one. I'm not sure why that would be. Is it just that we do not want a suspect to have the chance to make his case, even when ewe know he will be locked up forever right after making it? The lack of trust in our courts continues to puzzle me when it comes from conservatives. I would have thought that to be "conservative" would be to lean more heavily on the constitution as it is set up rather than allowing for ad hoc adjustments by whatever person happens to be in office at the time.